Complete guide to Microsoft Hyper-V 3 and storage

The newest version of Microsoft's virtualization platform, Hyper-V
3.0, touts new storage-related features and improvements that aim to simplify the
virtualization process and increase flexibility. This guide provides content that will explain and
review Hyper-V 3.0 features for storage such as shared-nothing live migration, which eliminates the
need for shared storage for live migration, or the replica feature, which facilitates disaster
recovery. Below are videos and expert insights providing everything you need to know about
Hyper-V 3.0 and storage, including how these features work and specifications needed in order to
use them.

Table of contents:

In previous versions of Hyper-V, the absence of shared storage meant some high-end features
couldn't be used. While Hyper-V 3.0 is optimized by using shared
storage, it will now be possible to utilize the live migration and failover clustering features
with direct-attached
storage, meaning the necessity for a SAN or a NAS has been eliminated for advanced features.

By making it possible to connect virtual
machines (VMs) directly to Fibre
Channel-based storage, Hyper-V 3.0's virtual Fibre Channel is essential to the virtualization
of more workloads. In the past, servers that had to be connected to Fibre Channel-based storage
were not impossible, but very difficult to virtualize. Now, administrators will be able to extend
virtualization to more VMs. They'll also have more flexibility, with the ability to create Fibre
Channel-based clusters at the guest level, virtual SANs
and the option to live migrate VMs without losing connectivity.

Shared-nothing
live migration, a new Hyper-V 3.0 feature, directly addresses a problem of earlier versions. In
the past, live migration required a cluster
built around a shared volume in which each host in the cluster was attached to the storage through
either an iSCSI or a Fibre
Channel connection. With shared-nothing live migration, the need for a Cluster Shared Volume is
eliminated. The VMs can reside on direct-attached storage, making the feature affordable to more IT
shops.

Hyper-V 3.0 comes with many highly anticipated new features, several of which focus on
improvements to storage specifically. The SMB
2.2 protocol will be supported, which is expected to bring faster and more reliable
performance, allowing VMs to be stored on file servers. There's also deduplication, Live Storage
Migration and shared-nothing live migration. Find out how these features work.

Hyper-V 3.0's Live Storage Migration feature is similar to VMware's
Storage vMotion in that it allows VMs to be moved to another storage device without
interrupting service. The feature is similar to Hyper-V's previous storage migration functionality,
Quick Storage Migration, but without Quick Storage Migration's brief interruption of storage during
migration.

Offloaded Data Transfer is a new feature in Hyper-V 3.0 that offloads storage-related tasks from
the server to the storage system. This frees the server up to handle virtualization tasks. If a
storage system supports Offloaded Data Transfer, Windows
Server 2012 will detect that and enable it automatically. Find out how it works.

New storage features in Hyper-V 3.0 are rivaling those of VMware, and at a lower cost.
In this video, storage expert Howard Marks says that sites running primarily Windows guests should take a serious look at Hyper-V 3.0 due to new features like Live Storage Migration and built-in data
deduplication.

Hyper-V
Replica, a feature in version 3.0, addresses disaster recovery by snapshotting
a VM every five minutes and then moving a copy to a secondary host. But this feature is intended
only as a recovery feature, rather than as a resiliency feature. Get more details on how Hyper-V
Replica works.

Windows Server 2012's Storage Spaces is a feature that simplifies capacity planning by enabling
thin provisioning of raw storage. Administrators use this feature by defining storage pools of
physical disks, each of which Windows can uniquely identify. They then can create virtual
hard disks within those pools, which appear to the operating system as a single physical disk.
Read up on how Windows Storage Spaces works.

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